TITTWIS 41: In grind mode, tryin' to get that bank

argh, I'm so excited about this job. Ever since I was "let go" from my last one I've been saying 'it's for the best. a better one will come along." But I was starting not to believe that. This job is designing and building web sites for about 14 departments on campus. It pays more than I've made since . . . well a really long time. The other two people on the team are really friendly and laid back and some of my friends from my last job are in this department too. hurrah!

this morning the cable guy's coming to hook us up and home depot says our fridge will finally be delivered. big things afoot at the new house!

How's everyone else doing? Pink, how much longer do you have?

our water's still turned off. :(

Not fun!

Hey, Sam, did you get the link to my photos from the last TITTWIS?

I need to take more house photos today as it's a bit more done.

Are your floors OK?

Fortunately the rooms that flooded were either a. slab waiting for tile or b. old tile waiting to be removed. So in that aspect we were blessed. G. is worried about mildewy smells though as the water went under the walls and came out the outside!

speaking of it's about time for me to start tiling. .

haven't been around for a long time...things are not good. i guess i don;t know what to say except that we lost our baby.

so we've been taking some time off and working things out...life is shitty sometimes.

i know how nice you all are and what not and may want to send something or something, but i ask you don't.

take care guys.

I broke up with Jen at the beginning of the year and moved to Portland, which is great. Portland is great, I mean. The breaking up part not so much, even though it was definitely for the best.

I live a short walk from Mr. Casuistry now, so yay!

Also, there are other things to talk about, but enough about me...

I'm a year in Austin now, a rough year. but things are looking up. We've recently bought a house and I'm starting a new job on Monday. :)

Wow, I'm still saving enough money to adopt a few cats. Heheheheh... A bunch of my more collectory and unused effects pedals are going up on eBay pretty soon. Also, I may be moving back to NYC again (of all places!) in a year or two, so the idea of putting down any kinda roots is sorta, well, hard to imagine for me at the moment.

I didn't have to get a new job to move, which was great because the job market in Portland is not so hot. At least not in my line of work... I still telecommute to a company that is actually located in Nashville, so they don't really care where I live as long as my infernet is high speed and I'm willing to be around during Central Time zone work hours when there's a meeting or something. With any luck I'll be able to keep this job for a while and move at the merest whim for some time to come!

owning a home is quite cool. I feel like it's another pet or part of our family. our little house has feelings mang!

Hi sarah!

Also, Sarah, I put a F@ke F1ct10ns song on a mix I made for someone recently. So yay!

I will hopefully be done with my album by the end of June!

OK, three kinds. Cheddar, emmenthal, and then chocolate. Our nighbors are crazy foodies and they invited my gf, three of our friends and myself at the last minute last night. How do you say no to fondue? I haven't had it in like, ten years.

Huk, maybe after she's been fiddling about in your mouth for a while, she'll realize that she loves you and needs to protect you your teeth.

Can I steal this scenario for my next screenplay?

ps I'm completely serious.

also, wtf, you can have it, but I'm using it too, but I trust that, y'know, i'm too lazy to actually get around to writing anything.

Shows you what kinda romantic I am. The kind who can't really articulate a concept when he needs to be clear.

Also I have a sincere crush at the moment which makes the romantic in me even more able to stifle my ability to form a complete thought or

Long story.

xxxxxxxpost

Normally at this time I'd be sitting down to eat dinner, but I've just now put some chicken thighs to roast in the oven to eat along with some brown rice and a salad, so I've got some time to kill on the computer. Ta-da.

luna, I hope did not offend thee.

I am seriously considering banging on me drum all day, because I totally don't wanna work.

http://flickr.com/photos/49364169@N00/sets/72057594103686248/

Of course it'a a "euphemism" for one of my "hobbies." It's also a not-very-obtuse "song reference."

Heh heh. Ahem.

there's no way i could work from home. i'm very undiscplined.

Well, I have been working from home off and on for about 6 years now, though this time around is the first in 1 or 2. I've never felt very disciplined, but apparently I am well enough to keep this job! I think I have a tendency to only work in two modes... Really really efficient and really really lazy. In the end they balance each other out. The only trick is forcing myself to be one of them on days where the other isn't warranted or possible.

That is my new favorite euphemism.

"What are you doing tonight?"

"Oh, gonna go home and kick back, bang on the drum, you know..."

"Oh, you play the drums?"

"Nope."

Hola señorita! I'm glad to hear about your new house! It looks cute! And hon, I'm not putting myself down. I'm just stating a truth that I have become peaceful with over the past few months. I am never going to be the type of female that a male could want to have as a companion. Hell, if it took this long to get a hetero male as a friend, you know? So I'm at peace with this now.

Sorry to hear about your depressiveness. Could it be the increasing temperatures? The stress involved in remodeling this house? A combination of both?

I'm sorry to hear you're not feeling great - maybe it IS the anti-depressants?

so sick of working on the house. i am a bum.

speaking of mp3 players my damn ipod's acting up. the clickwheel thing's not turning. boo. :(

oh, and my cat is afraid of our new refridgerator. the ice maker scares the shit out of him and he won't venture through the kitchen unless he is carried. pussy.

The last few days I've been feeling great mostly because I haven't been drinking any coffee after my couple cups in the morning.

It still makes me sad I can't just abuse coffee the way I used to and get away with it. I mean, y'all have seen my tattoo, right? Grrr.

Well, it was happy for me. I just assumed it was happy for both of us.

(This is evidence that I haven't had any caffeine at all today, and will rectify that immediately with girl coffee).

Ha! I don't even drink coffee, only double espressos. Still no hair on my chest, though.

In fact the only reason I got out of bed and showered just now is cause a friend called and wanted to go out and get lunch with me, but once I get back home after lunch I'm breaking out another pair of pajamas* and going back to work.

* Yes, since I work from home I do have a set of pajamas for every day of the week.

Although I promise this morning when I said Luna called me by accident, I really meant "call" as in on the "phone." "Honest."

The rest of the day was a mixed bag. The low points are thoroughly confusing, but the high point was intoxicatingly rich.

I'm still going to have to give it a 9.5.

I'm going to go make my emergency office girl coffee so I can open my eyes.

Today's the first day of my new job and I got up way too early. hurrah!

Otherwise, well, it was an interesting weekend, but not what I'd call good outright.

Good luck on your first day, Sam!

I was supposed to do work over the weekend, but I put it off until Sunday night and then I felt kinda pukey after I had dinner so I just went to bed. I feel better this morning, but now I have even more work to do today than I'd planned.

I really need to stop telling work that I can get stuff done over the weekend. It always seems like it won't be tough to put in a couple hours Sunday, and then I never want to.

new job so far great. I have three screens on my desk and every flavor of creative software imaginable. woo-hoo!

Huk, did you have your root canal yet?

I'm in a such a good mood it's ridiculous. I always fear something coming along to wreck good moods.

tell me about your spring weather so I can be jealous.

It's supposed to be 80 here today - the sky is relatively clear, but you can see a layer of haze over the hills. It seems a shame to waste it by being in the office all day.

!!!!????

michael that sounds lovely.

we're having a heat wave here and it's miserable. also the mosquitoes are out of control.

my eys hurt from staring at these screens.

Have been out of town for the past couple of days as my mother's in the ICU. so sick of sickness in my family. her health has done nothing but go downhill steadily for the past few years. Now I'm feeling slightly guilty like I should've stayed longer although there wasn't much for me to do.

also this visit and this scare just made all the more obvious the many issues my mom and I have. Now I can't stop thinking about the problems and how I'm going to fix them. B/c this week I truly thought my time to fix them had passed and I would have to live with the unresolved-ness for the rest of my life. I've been given a reprieve and must do something now. ugh.

and I come back to work to find some annoying (older) women in desktop support are sending me mockups of how they think I should change our dept.'s homepage layout. excuse me? I'm the web designer, not you. keep your word doc. designs to yourself. ergh.

now I've got to go build some interactive pages, plug them into a sql db I have to build, test them, and oh yeah, do the graphics. all by the end of the day.

I just want to crawl into a hole. or at least back into bed.

I can also empathise with your coworker problems. Everything would be so much easier if I was just left alone!

on the other hand I have only just realised - after years of guilt - that it's not up to me on my own to fix it.

No it isn't up to one side to fix it but you can't sit back and wait for the other side to do so either. you have to make the effort needed of you and let them respond.

or at least that's what I need to do with my mom. My grandmother dying last year has just put that much more distance btw us. Since then my mother has kind of opened the door by saying that when her mother died she realized how much they weren't close and she didn't want to make the same mistake with me. There's my cue to speak up.

But I haven't yet b/c my mother's health is so touch and go. I really expected her to die before my grandmother. her doctors have basically said she will never get "better" we just have to keep her from getting worse. So all the things I feel stand between us, I've been reluctant to bring up b/c it won't be pretty. I don't want to upset her, make her sicker etc. also my mother's a petty, selfish queen. She has no qualms about cutting family out of her life and depending on how she wants to react to the things I have to say to her she could decide to cut me out. My brother says that will be her choice and it's a risk I've got to take b/c she'll never address these issues herself. And she and I will never be close until they are aired.

arrrggghhhhh.

Pretty good thanks luna, apart from the heat! A few aches and pains but I have more energy than I did at first - just looking forward to 20 week scan in two weeks. Oh and thanks for your ecard :)

I still don't have a nice pregnant looking bump though, just a podgy bit that looks like I've eaten too many pies :(

Spencer was over at my mom's house tonight with Eric to set up my mom's new computer, and her brother the cunt, who lives there, physically threatened my child. Apparently, Spencer took a tootsie roll pop over to mom's and laid it down on the table before going off to watch daddy set up the computer, and Bryan ate it without asking him. Spencer, as some children are wont to do, got upset and demanded that Bryan pay him a dollar so he could go to the store and buy another ten pack (you can't buy them singly there, you see) and Bryan said "well, shouldn't have left it out on the table." Spencer then got a glass of water and said "if you don't give me the dollar, I'll throw water on you."

We stop here to note that his parents do not condone or tolerate threats, and have spoken to him about this in the past.

Spencer says that Bryan then chased him through the house into the back room where he ended up "trapped behind the door to teach him a lesson about respect and what happens when you threaten people who are bigger than you," (a direct quote from Bryan to me). Eric was in the room, and saw Bryan viciously shove the door handle into Spencer's chest out of the corner of his eye. At that point, he stood up and threatened to throw B off the balcony, had a minor yelling match with my drunken mother (who swears Bryan is telling the truth even though she was in the other room and Eric and Spencer both told the same story to me separately), and packed Spencer up and brought him home.

I tried to call over there, but neither of them will talk to me after I tried to explain to them Spencer's side of the story and refused to accept that Bryan didn't "do it on purpose" or, in a later version, didn't do it at all. "Aimee Aimee Aimee, he says, you're overreacting." I'M OVERREACTING? You physically threaten my son, shove a pointy doorhandle into his chest WHILE YOU HAVE HIM TRAPPED BEHIND THE DOOR, and I'm overreacting?

He's lucky I don't go throw him off the balcony myself.

How does that work, exactly? :)

I don't know what to tell you about your mom Luna. I think that shall be my situation soon. This hospital round has highlight some of her problems and we (family) can't ignore them anymore. I'm feeling like whatever resolution is tried it will end up with she and I no longer speaking. and that's just the way it is.

Oh hell, I don't know. Nevahmind.

Anyway, I don't know, maybe it's not a good idea here, so I'll just put the whole notion to bed for now, but you know, if anyone ever does become interested, lemme know.

what's lined up for you next?

Way to go, Huk!

I'm sorry to hear about the family dramas. I'm glad though, Sam, that you are ready to do something about it, even if you're not sure exactly what yet.

I feel like I don't have much to report myself. I spent the last two weekends at music festivals, festivaling it up. It's 92 degrees here in Chicago with some god-awful heat index. We lost power last night for at least an hour. I very quickly grew to appreciate our little window AC unit.

Our band keeps playing shows. We had our cd release mid-July and it went pretty well. Nick and I are still on to get married June 2nd, 07. :-D

Either way, I suppose congratulations are in order.

i miss it here. hope everyone is good. its 98 degrees here.

But yeah, no, not exactly what I mean. I dunno, some things sound like such good ideas at times, and then in the cold, harsh light of day, they just... don't.

Forgive me for not knowing the mechanics of this message board community well, but -- why? Why would there be this huge controversy over something that's as simple as that which you proposed? Does this have any relation to the seeming existence of "golden children" on this forum? You know -- offend the wrong people for whatever stupid reason(s) they propose and instantly encounter hurricane-strength wrath? I say just go with your idea and "fuck the hataz", as the young people of today would put it.

sam and luna, best wishes to deal with icky family situations. luna, i think you did well to not hit a certain someone upside the head with a frying pan (like people do in cartoons, but never seem to do in real life).

m.white, i was giving you as an example of the kind of guy that could wear a seersucker suit and get away with it. do you have any?

sarah, glad to hear the band is going well, i really hope i can hear you guys sometime when i visit chicago.

yay for huck finally quitting your job!

not sure if i have an opinion about the girl-slanted board alternative. i spend more time on another site at the moment that's mostly girls, and it's generally more polite and stuff, but there can be some really nasty and mean stuff. but you don't get the random noize dudes, either, so that makes things less annoying if you're trying to be even a little serious...

hope everyone is having an ok monday

My mom called me Saturday afternoon. Didn't apologize exactly, but said she missed me, missed Spencer, and just felt terrible about the whole thing. We talked about it a little, but she still doesn't want to hear that Eric isn't the devil here, but I think I got her to admit to as much as I can for now. I took her shopping yesterday, like I do most weekends, and we chatted idly about everything BUT what happened last week, but you know, I think that's okay for now.

The best news she had was that Bryan is leaving for Thailand on Wednesday.

How have the rest of you been doing? It feels freeing posting here again under a new username, but awkward because it means I could not make a successful disconnect from ILX. *shrug* It shouldn't matter, really. And it doesn't, not now. I'm perfectly happy just having fun around here the way I should've since the beginning.

And when are we all going to converge for a TITTWIS FAP? Or is that completely off the schedule?

http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=-6497257644936185526&q=genre:comedy

Anyway, enough about me -- how about you guys? What's going on with you?

M. White, that video was hilarious. Taking into consideration its entertainment factor, necessary for our gray Thursdays, it was apropos of EVERYTHING.

My mother's back in the hospital. They let her out last Sat. and then Mon. she had to go back. For one day we thought she had lung cancer until they said "just kidding! that wasn't a tumor." Gee, thanks. They still can't figure out what's wrong with her lungs though.

My mom is on all manner of medicines for all kind of ails. But it's become obvious to us that there is a problem with how she uses her pain medication (OxyC0tin for one).After consulting with other family members, yesterday I called her doctor.

I shared our concerns with her and gave her some examples of the misuse. She said she would "confront" her about it and get the pain mgmt. specialist to look her over and consult.

I tremble. My mom's going to think either my aunt or me started this and then we will be sent to Siberia. Oh well, it needed to be done.

It just felt weird doing that.